FCC report: ViaSat's Exede keeps promise on speed

For years, satellite internet service had a reputation for being slow and expense. The Federal Communication Commission didn’t even include satellite in its periodic reports on high-speed Internet performance in the U.S. -- likely because of the technology's sluggishness.

But a new generation of faster Internet satellite is now in orbit – including one from Carlsbad’s ViaSat. And the FCC is taking notice – giving a good review to ViaSat’s Exede satellite internet service for beating promised download and upload speeds.

On Friday, the FCC released the 2013 Measuring Broadband America: A Report on Consumer Wire line Performance in the U.S. The nationwide study, conducted in September, measures the actual service performance for thousands of residential broadband subscribers.

The report includes results for four broadband Internet technologies – DSL, cable, fiber and satellite – marking the first time the FCC has included satellite in the survey.

At an advertised download speed of 12 megabits per second, ViaSat’s Exede wasn’t the fastest Internet service out there. Cable and fiber lead the pure speed race. But Exede did score points by consistently beating the 12 megabits per second advertised speeds.

“In our testing, we found that during peak periods 90 percent of ViaSat consumers received 140 percent or better of the advertised speed of 12 Mbps,” the report said. “In addition, there was very little difference between peak and non-peak performance.”

Exede customers were getting about 16.5 megabits per second instead of the 12 megabits per second, according to the report. The service starts at $50 a month, with a 10 gigabit per month usage cap. Exede offers more data consumption for a higher monthly subscription fee.

“Our goal has always been to give our Exede customers the most consistent broadband experience, and it’s good to have objective data showing we delivered on our promise to deliver great speeds,” said ViaSat Chief Executive Mark Dankberg in a statement. “It’s especially important to us that the data was collected from Exede subscribers and that the FCC offered us the opportunity to be ranked side by side against DSL and cable services.”

While the report praised Exede’s speeds, it noted that satellite Internet still lags other technologies for latency -- a slight delay that occurs as data travels thousands of miles from the satellite to the customer. Satellite latency remains 20 times that of most wired Internet services, the report said. Measured in milliseconds, latency becomes noticeable for people who use their Internet provider for voice calls or who play real-time action-based video games online.

ViaSat’s satellite Internet business ended the December quarter with 467,000 total subscribers, compared with 429,000 the prior quarter. HughesNet also launched a similar high capacity Internet satellite, which began service last year.